Song of Kali

Chapter Three

We flew into Calcutta at midnight, coming in from the south, over the Bay of Bengal.

"My God," I whispered. Amrita leaned across me to peer out the window.

On the advice of her parents, we had flown BOAC into Bombay to go through customs there. That had worked fine, but the connecting Air India flight to Calcutta had been delayed for three hours due to mechanical problems. We finally were allowed to board, only to sit at the terminal for another hour with no lights or air conditioning because the external generators had been detached. A businessman in the row ahead of us said that the Bombay-Calcutta flight had been late every day for three weeks because of a feud between the pilot and flight engineer.

Once airborne, we were routed far south of our path because of severe thunderstorms. Victoria had fussed much of the evening, but now she was sleeping in her mother's arms.

"My God," I said again. Calcutta was stretched out below, over 250 square miles of city, a galaxy of lights after the absolute blackness of cloud tops and the Bay of Bengal. I had flown into many cities at night, but none like this. Instead of the usual geometries of electric lights, Calcutta at midnight was ablaze with countless lanterns, open fires, and a strange, soft glow — an almost fungal phosphorescence — that oozed from a thousand unseen sources. Instead of the predictable urban progression of straight lines — streets, highways, parking lots — Calcutta's myriad of fires seemed scattered and chaotic, a jumbled constellation broken only by the dark curve of the river. I imagined that this was what London or Berlin must have looked like — burning — to awed bomber crews during the war.

Then the wheels touched down, the terrible humidity invaded the cool cabin, and we were out in and part of the shuffling crowd making its way toward Baggage Claims. The terminal was small and filthy. Despite the late hour, sweating mobs were jostling and shouting all around us.

"Wasn't someone supposed to meet us?" asked Amrita.

"Yeah." I had rescued the four bags from the broken conveyor belt, and we stood by them as the crowd ebbed and flowed against us. There was a sense of hysteria in the pulses of white-shirted, saried humanity in the little building. "Morrow had a contact with the Bengali Writers' Union. Some fellow named Michael Leonard Chatterjee was supposed to give us a ride to the hotel, but we're hours late. He probably went home. I'll try to get a cab."

One glance at the doorway jammed with shoving, shouting men made me stay standing by the bags.

"Mr. and Mrs. Luczak. Robert Luczak?"

"Loo-zack," I said, automatically correcting the pronunciation. "Yes, I'm Robert Luczak." I looked at the man who had shoved his way up to us. He was tall and skinny, wearing dirty brown trousers and a white shirt that looked gray and grimy in the green fluorescent lighting. His face was relatively young — late twenties, perhaps — and clean-shaven, but his black hair stood out in great electric tufts and his dark, piercing eyes gave an impression of such intensity that it bordered on a sense of restrained violence. His eyebrows were dark brush strokes that almost met above a falcon's predatory beak. I took half a step back and dropped a suitcase to free my right hand. "Mr. Chatterjee?"

"No, I have not seen Mr. Chatterjee," he replied shrilly. "I am M. T. Krishna." At first, through the noise and heavy singsong dialect, I heard it as "empty Krishna."

I extended my hand, but Krishna had turned and was leading the way outside. He used his right arm to shove people aside. "This way, please. Quickly, quickly."

I nodded at Amrita and lifted three of the bags. Incredibly, Victoria had continued to sleep through the heat and bedlam. "Are you with the Writers' Union?" I asked.

"No, no, no." Krishna did not turn his head as he spoke. "I am a part-time teacher, you see. I have contacts with the U.S. Education Foundation in India. My supervisor, Mr. Shah, was contacted by his very good and longtime friend, Mr. Abraham Bronstein of New York City, who asked me to extend this kindness. Quickly."

Outside, the air seemed even heavier and more moist than in the steaming terminal. Searchlights illuminated a silver sign above the terminal doors. "Dum-Dum Airport," I read aloud.

"Yes, yes. It is here they made the bullets until they were outlawed after World War Number One," said Krishna. "This way, please."

Suddenly we were surrounded by a dozen porters clamoring to carry our few bags. The men were reed-thin, bare-legged, draped in brown rags. One was missing an arm. Another looked as if he had been in a terrible fire: his chin was welded to his chest by great wattles of scar tissue. Evidently he could not speak, but urgent sounds gurgled up from his ruined throat.

"Give them the luggage," snapped Krishna. He gestured imperiously as the porters scrambled over one another to get at the bags.

We had to walk only sixty feet or so along the curved drive. The air was weighted with moisture, as dark and heavy as a soaked army blanket. For a dizzy second I thought it was snowing, as the air appeared to be swirling with white flecks; then I realized that there were a million insects dancing in the beams of the terminal spotlights. Krishna gestured to the porters, pointed to a vehicle, and I stopped in surprise. "A bus?" I said, although the blue-and-white van was more of a jitney than a full-fledged bus. The legend USEFI was printed along its side.

"Yes, yes, yes. It was the only transport available. Quickly now."

One of the porters, agile as a monkey, clambered up the back of the bus to the roof. Our four bags were handed up and secured to the luggage rack. As they tied down a strip of black plastic over the luggage, I wondered idly why we couldn't have taken them in the bus. Shrugging, I fumbled out two five-rupee notes to tip the porters. Krishna took them out of my hand, gave one back.

"No. It is too much," he said. I shrugged again and helped Amrita to get aboard. Victoria had finally awakened at the shouting of the agitated porters and was adding her shrill cry to the general confusion. We nodded at the sleepy driver and took the second seat on the right. At the door, Krishna was arguing with three of the porters who had carried our bags. Amrita did not understand all of the cascade of Bengali, but she picked up enough to tell me that the porters were upset because they could not divide five rupees three ways. They demanded another rupee. Krishna shouted something and went to close the door of the bus. The oldest porter, his face a maze of deep gullies forested with white stubble, stepped forward and blocked the folding door with his body. Other porters drifted over from their place near the terminal doors. Shouts turned to screams.

"For Chrissake," I said to Krishna, "here, give them a few more rupees. Let's get out of here."

"No!" Krishna's gaze swept my direction, and the violence there was no longer restrained. It held the gleeful look one sees on the faces of men at a blood sport. "It is too much," he said firmly.

There was a mob of porters at the door now. Suddenly hands began slapping against the side of the bus. The driver sat up and adjusted his cap nervously. The old man in the doorway had stepped up onto the lowest step as if to enter, but Krishna put three fingers against the bare chest and pushed firmly. The old man fell backward onto the sea of brown-garbed forms.

Gnarled fingers suddenly gripped the partially opened window next to Amrita, and the porter with the burned face pulled himself up as if he were on a chinning bar. Inches from us, his mouth worked frantically, and we could see that he had no tongue. Saliva spattered the dust-streaked window.

"Goddammit, Krishna!" I rose to give the porters the money. At that moment three policemen appeared out of the shadows. They wore white helmets, Sam Browne belts, and khaki shorts. Two of them carried lathi sticks — the Indian version of a cop's nightstick — three feet of heavy wood with an iron core in the business end.

The mob of porters continued shouting, but melted back to let the police advance. The scarred face dropped away from Amrita's window. The first cop banged his stick on the front of the bus, and the old porter turned to shout his complaints. The policeman raised his deadly club and screamed back. Krishna took the opportunity to swing the handle that closed the door of the bus. He snapped two syllables to the driver and we began to move, accelerating quickly down the dark driveway. There was a loud clang as a thrown rock struck the rear of the bus.

Then we were out of the airport and swinging onto an empty four-lane road. "VIP Highway," called Krishna from where he still stood by the door. "Traveled only by very important persons." A pale billboard flashed by to the right. The simple message — in Hindi, Bengali, and English — read WELCOME TO CALCUTTA.

We drove without headlights, but the interior lights of the bus stayed on. Amrita's lovely eyes were set with circles of fatigue. Victoria — too exhausted to sleep, tired of crying — made mewling noises from her mother's arms. Krishna sat down sideways on the seat in front of us, hawk nose in profile, his angry countenance illuminated by the overhead bulbs and an occasional street light.

"I went to university in the States for almost three years," he said.

"Really?" I said. "That's very interesting." I felt like smashing the stupid son of a bitch's face in for creating such a mess.

"Yes, yes. I worked with blacks, Chicanos, red Indians. The oppressed people of your country."

The marshy fields of darkness that had bordered the highway gave way suddenly to a jumble of shacks that came right up to the shoulder of the road. Lanterns glowed through burlap walls. In the distance a bonfire showed sharp silhouettes moving jerkily in front of yellow flames. Seemingly without transition we were out of the country and winding through narrow, rain-filled streets that twisted past blocks of derelict high-rises, miles of tin-roofed slums, and endless vistas of decaying, blackened storefronts.

"My professors were fools. Conservative fools. They thought that literature was composed of dead words in books."

"Yes," I said. I had no idea of what Krishna was talking about.

The streets were flooded. Water stood two and three feet deep in places. Under tattered canvas, robed figures sat and slept and squatted and stared at us with eyes that showed only white in orbs of shadow. Each alley gave a glimpse of open rooms, starkly lit courtyards, shadows moving within shadows. A frail man pulling a heavy cart had to leap aside as our bus roared past, throwing a curtain of water across him and his load. He shook his fist, and his mouth shaped unheard obscenities.

The buildings seemed ancient beyond age, decayed remnants of some forgotten millennium — some pre-human age — for the shadows, angles, apertures, and emptinesses did not fit the architecture of man. Yet, on every second or third floor there were open-windowed glimpses of humanity inhabiting these druidic shambles: bare bulbs swinging, bobbing heads, peeled walls with plaster rotting off the white rib-bones of the building, garish illustrations of multi-armed deities clipped from magazines and taped crookedly to walls or window-panes, the cries of children playing, running, fleeing through the knife-blackened alleys, the wail of infants half heard — and everywhere the random movement caught in the corner of one's vision, the sibilant rush of the bus's tires on wet clay and tarmac, and the sight of sheeted figures lying like corpses in the sidewalk shadows. A terrible feeling of déjà vu came over me.

"I quit in disgust when a fool of a professor would not accept my paper on Walt Whitman's debt to Zen Buddhism. An arrogant, parochial fool."

"Yes," I said. "Do you think we could turn off these inside lights?"

We were approaching the center of the city. Rotting residential slums gave way to larger, even more decayed-looking buildings. There were few street lights. Vague flickers of heat lightning were reflected in the deep pools of black water that filled the intersections. Every darkened storefront seemed to hold the silent, sheeted forms lying like unclaimed bundles of laundry or propped up to watch us pass. The yellow lights inside the bus made the three of us look like waxen corpses. I knew now how prisoners of war must feel while being paraded through the streets of the enemy's capital.

Ahead, a boy stood atop a crate in a black circle of water and swung what I took to be a dead cat by its tail. He threw it as the bus approached, and it was not until the furry corpse bounced hollowly off the windshield that I realized it had been a rat. The driver cursed and swerved toward the child. The boy leaped away with a flash of brown legs, and the crate he had been standing on splintered under our right wheel.

"You understand, of course, because you are a poet," said Krishna, and bared small, sharp teeth.

"What about the lights?" I asked. I could feel the rage rising in me. Amrita touched my arm with her left hand.

Krishna snapped something in Bengali. The driver shrugged and grunted an answer.

"The switch is broken," said Krishna.

We swung into an open square. What may have been a park cut a solid line of blackness through the maze of sagging buildings. Two streetcars sat abandoned in the center of a cluttered plaza while a dozen families huddled nearby under sagging canvas. It began to rain again. The sudden downpour beat at the metal of the bus like fists from the dark sky. Only the driver's side of the windshield had a wiper, and it moved sluggishly against the curtain of water that soon put a veil between the city and us.

"We must talk about Mr. M. Das," said Krishna.

I blinked. "I would like the lights out," I said slowly and distinctly. The irrational fury had been building in me since the airport. In a second I knew I would be choking this smug, insensitive cretin; choking him until his froglike eyes popped out of his stupid head. I felt the anger flow down into me like the heat from a strong drink. Amrita must have sensed my second of insanity, for her restraining hand closed on my arm like a vise.

"It is very important that I talk to you about Mr. M. Das," said Krishna. The heat in the bus was almost overpowering. Sweat stood on our faces like burn blisters. Our breath seemed to hang in the air like vapor while the world remained obliterated by the crashing downpour outside.

"I'll turn out the fucking lights," I said, and started to rise. Amrita would have held me back with both hands had it not been for Victoria.

Krishna's heavy brows went up in surprise as I towered over him. I freed my right arm just as Amrita said, "It doesn't matter, Bobby. We're here. Look, there's the hotel."

I paused and then stooped to look out the window. The downpour had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and only a light drizzle continued to fall. My anger diminished with the ebbing sound of rain on the roof.

"We will perhaps speak later, Mr. Luczak," said Krishna. "It is most important. Tomorrow, perhaps."

" Yeah." I lifted Victoria in my arms and led the way off the bus.

The front of the Oberoi Grand Hotel was as dark as a granite cliff, but a little light escaped from the double doorway. A tattered awning ran to the curb. On either side, standing silently under rain-slicked umbrellas, were a dozen or so shadowy figures. Some were holding soggy placards. I could make out a hammer and sickle, and the English word UNFAIR on one. "Strikers," said Krishna as he snapped his fingers at a sleepy, red-vested porter. I shrugged. A picket line outside a pitch-black hotel at one-thirty A.M. in monsoon-drenched Calcutta did not surprise me. Sometime in the previous half-hour, my sense of reality had slipped its tether. A roaring filled my ears like the rasp of countless insect legs. Jet lag, I thought.

"Thank you for picking us up," said Amrita as Krishna hopped back aboard the bus.

He flashed his baby shark's grimace. "Yes, yes. I talk to you tomorrow. Good night. Good night."

The entrance to the hotel seemed to include several dark hallways that separated the lobby from the street like a protective labyrinth. The lobby itself was bright enough. The clerk was wide awake, smartly dressed, and pleased to see us. Yes, the reservations were right here for Mr. and Mrs. Luczak. Yes, they had received our Telex about the delay. The baggage porter was an old man, but he cooed at Victoria as we took the elevator to the sixth floor and I gave him ten rupees as he left us.

Our room was as cavernous and shadowy as everything else in the city, but it seemed relatively clean and there was a heavy bolt on the door.

"Oh, no!" It was Amrita's voice from the bathroom. I was there in three strides with my heart pounding.

"There are no towels," said Amrita. "Only washcloths." We both began to laugh then. One of us would stop, only to have the other start it up again.

It took us ten minutes to make a nest for Victoria on the empty bed, to strip off our sweat-sodden clothes, rinse up as well as possible, and crawl under the thin spread together. The air conditioner clunked and wheezed hollowly. Somewhere closeby, a toilet flushed explosively. The throbbing sound in my ears was the echo of jet engines.

"Sweet dreams, Victoria," said Amrita. The baby cooed softly in her sleep.

We were asleep in two minutes.